I wanted to give this release some time before I dove in but it looks like it may never end lol
The Union x Air Jordan 4 Tent and Trail release has been at best “okay”. I say that because after watching A Ma Maniere go 3/3 (in-store raffle, online raffle, online FCFS) in execution it feels like a mess to have been raffling shoes for 3 weeks. It is really hard to raffle a lot of shoes because of the volume and man power needed and that is why you are seeing a lot of invoices go out so late. I think I saw people winning Friday! They have cancelled a ton of bot invoices and multi-orders and in doing that have to draw more raffle wins. Do they regret doing this with it taking so long? Maybe? Tough to tell for sure but I know I would at least be second guessing myself a bit if I was them after all the positive feedback they got before.
With that said, Im familiar with the back end set up they use here and this was truly the first major major drop to go full raffle on Shopify. I expect they have learned a lot, gathered a ton of data to black list bots and in turn future releases could go quicker and smoother. The company that handles the back end shares data anonymization across stores so while this was a painful drop, the amount of black listed IPs, addresses, zips, names, emails etc likely grew 10x and will help the industry as a whole.
Personally, I would like to see major brand based drops be distributed like AMM because they took care of their in-store customers, then online customers who dont have time to do anything but raffle and then finally a FCFS very bot protected online release for everyone else. Balance is key IMO and skewing too heavily in either direction will always upset someone.